


your prison is walking through this world all alone

by BadWolfGirl01



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Inspired by Music, Jyn Erso-centric, Kinda, Songfic, okay the lyrics of desperado just fit them both so perfectly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 22:09:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11240256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolfGirl01/pseuds/BadWolfGirl01
Summary: canonverse Jyn-centric fic, inspired by "Desperado" by the Eagles, in particular "and freedom, oh freedom, well that's just some people talking/your prison is walking through this world all alone"three parts.





	your prison is walking through this world all alone

She is Stardust, on Lah’mu.

Her Papa explained it, once; that when stars die  _ (how can a star die if it’s not alive? it’s called a supernova, my stardust, and it only happens every few thousand years, when a star explodes) _ , they turn into the very same elements human bodies are made of, because the universe never wastes anything  _ (like recycling? exactly like recycling, my dear) _ . And so there is stardust in her bones and in her smile and sparkling in her eyes.

Then the man in white comes, with his shiny black soldiers--she thinks they look like toys, almost, standing straight and steady with their blasters as polished as their armor. She’s not even sure there are  _ people _ inside. They certainly don’t  _ look _ like people.

The man in white, however, certainly looks like people, but his face is cold and hard and she doesn’t know what to call the look in his eyes. He looks at her papa like he’s  _ nothing _ , just something to be used and emptied and drained, like he’s one of their gardens.

Then her mama runs out with a blaster, and everything happens very fast after that.

But when she sees her mama cold and twisted on the grass, and her papa in a ship flying away (leaving her  _ alone _ ), she can’t help but think that stardust isn’t so beautiful after all.

 

The Partisans call her Jyn; Saw doesn’t tell them her last name, doesn’t say  _ why _ he left Onderon out of the blue and returned with a silent eight-year-old girl with empty eyes. She doesn’t explain it either, just lets them wonder while she spends her days trailing a step behind Saw himself, a silent spectre, watching his every motion.

That’s how she learns.

Some of Saw’s soldiers find her, one night, sitting in a darkened storeroom with a single dingy bulb flickering over her head, suspended by peeling wires from a plastoid lamp base. She’s bent over the innards of a crude but effective bomb, one that she’s watched Saw build several times, carefully crossing wires over each other.

“What do we have here?” one asks--later, she’ll learn his name is Kev--coming up behind her.

She jumps, startled, and touches the wrong wires together on accident. The unfinished but very much  _ explosive _ bomb sparks; she freezes, lets out a string of curses that would’ve made her father choke and her mother blanch, and whips around to glare at the men.

“You kriffing  _ idiots _ !” she exclaims. “Are you  _ trying  _ to blow us all up?”

(Later, she’ll find it strangely fitting that her first sentence to anyone other than Saw was an insult.)

“What do you think you’re doing?” Kev demands, ignoring her.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she says with a careless shrug, “so I came down here.”

“How did you know how to do that?” another man asks.

She gives him a sharp look. “I  _ watched _ .”

The next day, they start teaching her to fight. Well, ‘teaching’ may be a bit of an overstatement; she’s thrown into the center of a ring of Partisans, pitted against another soldier (usually one of the men or women who’d been fighting for several years), and told to fight. (They do shout advice at her, though. Not that it helps that much.)

She doesn’t win her first fight, of course. She’s an undersized, scrawny eight-year-old girl with no training against a grown man with years of experience.

She doesn’t win her first fight, or her second, or even her fiftieth. But by the time she turns nine, she’s beaten every one of the Partisans (except Saw) at least once. She still loses, occasionally, but that’s rare, and it grows ever-rarer the older she gets.

She loses her last fight when she’s eleven, to a cocky new recruit with a swaggering step and a brash, arrogant grin, and the humiliation is so powerful she swears she will never lose another fight.

She doesn’t.

(Later, after a near brush with death, the recruit changes his name, steals one of Saw’s ships, and vanishes. The last she hears of him is that he trashed the stolen ship, won a new ship to replace her, earned a Wookiee copilot and an unrepayable debt to Jabba the Hutt. She finds him once, on Tatooine, when she’s stranded and in desperate need of some credits to get offworld. She never does find out if he recognized her or not.)

Three days after her ninth birthday, she’s sent on her first mission for Saw--simple reconnaissance. No one takes note of another filthy, abandoned child; she completes the mission perfectly. It only takes her two months to make it onto the attack roster. Sometimes, the other Partisans question her skill level. She puts those questions to rest very quickly.

(The ones that underestimate her are always her favorite. She knocks them to the ground so much faster. They never make that mistake twice.)

She kills her first stormtrooper on that attack: sneaks up behind him and slips a vibroblade between two of the white plastoid plates covering his torso. When he falls to his knees, she kicks him down to the ground, stands on his back to yank off his helmet, and plunges the vibroblade into the side of the neck, slitting his throat.

(That night she dreams about it--about the resistance, the sound he made, the surprise in his eyes, how almost  _ comical _ he looked with his throat gaping open in a raw, bloody smile. She wakes screaming and almost goes to Saw, but she knows what the look on his face will be when she admits the dream to him--that soft disappointment and resignation, like she’s failed him. So she curls into a ball beneath her scratchy, thin blanket and tries not to cry, and she retreats inside the cave in her mind and faces her demons just as she’s faced everything since Lah’mu: alone)

She’s not quite ten when she leaves the first comrade behind.

She’s part of a team of four infiltrating a small Imperial outpost on a nearby moon with the plan to blow the entire base sky-high. The mission doesn’t quite go as planned, and she ends up sprinting desperately through the regulation-white corridors of the base under heavy blasterfire, Kev on her heels. She carries the remote detonator for all the charges they’ve set; the plan was to slip in (her and Kev on one side, Jorvin on the other), set the charges, and slip out. Only once they made it back to their ship was Jyn supposed to detonate the bombs. 

But now the plans have changed.

They’d managed to set all the charges before the stormtroopers noticed them; the first indication that the plan was falling apart came with Jorvin’s voice echoing tinny and rough over the tiny comlink.

_ “All my charges are down and green,” _ he’d said.  _ “Jyn, what’s your sta-” _

The sound of sharp yelling and blasterfire cut him off, and she could only assume his silence meant he was dead. It was a shame--he’d been a good soldier--but she knew he’d been prepared to die for the cause. All of them are, after all.

Then Kev swears as they skid around a corner, just one turn from the exit, and she looks back to see that he’s been shot in the leg. He tries to take a step and the injured leg buckles beneath him, unable to support his weight, and even though she’s not even half his size and there’s no way she could hold him up, he looks pleadingly at her.

And she  _ wants _ to go to him, she really does; but Saw’s voice rasps in her mind.  _ Jyn, child, listen closely, because this is something you must never forget. If someone gets hurt on a mission and cannot keep up, you must leave them behind. Everyone here is prepared to give their life for the cause, and they all know that the cause is more important than any of us. The success of the mission must always come first; the cause is the most important thing. The  _ only _ thing. Do you understand? _

(“Whatever I do, I do it to protect you. Say you understand,” Papa’s voice pleads with her, urgent yet gentle and so very  _ desperate _ .

“I understand.”

She hadn’t understood then. And it’s not even been two full years since that day.

How can she hope to understand now?)

_ I understand _ , she’d told Saw.

“I’m sorry,” she tells Kev, then, with the goal so close in front of them, and then she turns and flies through the corridor alone (always alone), and as soon as she’s through the door she hits the detonator.

Then she’s back at the ship and the pilot (someone new, Jyn doesn’t even know her name for certain, Lana or Lara or something like that) looks back at her with a question in her eyes.

“Get us out of here,” Jyn barks sharply, her hands still clutching the detonator like a lifeline.

Lana sucks in a breath, then nods, and the ship shoots off into space, the base awash in fire and ash behind them.

 

She is sixteen when Saw takes over half the Partisans (and her) on a mission to sabotage an Imperial research facility somewhere in the Mid Rim; none of them are privileged to know exactly where it is they’re going. From the moment their ship lands, everything seems to just go wrong.

As if the mission wasn’t long enough and hard enough already.

They lose six good soldiers in the firefight, but with Jyn’s help they manage to plant all the bombs; somehow, she and Saw make it out together. Neither of them have any idea, really, who is still inside the facility, but Saw doesn’t care. He lights the base up, and then they run, harder and faster than they’ve ever run before.

It’s dangerous, sure, but nothing worse than Jyn’s faced before; really, she should’ve realized something was up long before she actually does. But she  _ trusts _ Saw, loves him like a father, and so when the bunker emerges from the smoke and dust she steps up to the door and doesn’t think to wonder.

“I need to get the rest of the troops together,” Saw tells her as he opens the bunker door. “I’ll be back for you soon--it’s getting dark and it’s dangerous, and you know what would happen if any Imps catch you,” he adds quickly, forestalling the protest rising on her lips.

“I can handle myself,” she says, but when he gestures to the bunker interior she enters without question.

“Take these,” he says, offering her a knife and a new, fully-charged blaster.

(She doesn’t think to ask why he’s carrying a new blaster with him, just takes it.)

The door sealing shut between them carries the weight of Fate (or the Force, or whatever else you want to call it), and for the first time in a long time Jyn feels a twinge of fear.

Three days later, tucked in the cargo bay of a ship headed off-planet, all alone and still red-eyed from sobbing, she makes a silent vow.

She will  _ never _ trust anyone again.


End file.
